Healthy Sleep Trends:

The Benefits of a Nice, Long Nap

Video Transcript

Michael Breus, PhD: The 45 minute to hour and half nap that people may take actually allows them to get into deeper sleep.That’s the more refreshing, that’s where your growth hormone is produced, that’s where you wake up refreshed, you feel good. You may even go into REM sleep.

Narrator : REM sleep being dreaming?

Michael Breus, PhD: Well, remember, dreaming can occur in any stage of sleep. Dreaming can occur in stages one, two, three, four, or REM sleep.You’re just more likely to be dreaming when you’re in REM sleep, Uh than in any other stage. REM sleep we know has a lot of different uh qualities to it.We know that REM sleep is when you seem to transfer information from your short term into your long term memoryso what I tell people it’s kind of from your floppy disk to your hard drive, if you will. So REM sleep is very, very important. We don’t know all the reasons why it’s important.We know that memory occurs, we know that dreaming may occur there more than anywhere else and we also know that people problem solve better when they have REM sleep.So if you give somebody a problem to solve and ask them to go to sleep, if you deprive them of REM sleepthey are not going to come up with the answer nearly as quickly as if they got that REM sleep.So when people are trying to come up with a creative new idea, sleeping on it is actually a pretty good idea.Now the one thing that people have to remember is, if you go into REM sleep in the 20 minute section of your nap, that means one of two things.That means either you are sleep deprived, Uh, or, you could potentially have a situation called narcolepsy.Narcolepsy is where people will actually, their body just kind of clicks into REM sleep whether they like it or not, sometimes during the middle of the day.